The Journey of an Accidental Environmentalist, Part 1

The People Need the Trees

Photo: Plant With Purpose

“I know you guys plant trees, but I am more into helping people. I would rather feed a hungry child.”

It seems as though I have spent a good portion of the last twenty-five years explaining to people why we plant trees. Yes, trees are pretty, and yes, trees sequester carbon. They also create shade and produce oxygen. Trees are the “lungs of the planet.” However, fundamentally, the reason we started planting trees is because they are one of best ways of helping hungry people, who grow their own food, to restore and get the most out of the land they depend on.

I readily confess that I didn’t get it at first either. I have often said that my entry into Christian environmentalism, into earth keeping, was as much an accident of geography as anything. As a Navy veteran, I was finishing graduate school in international relations at the University of San Diego, with a focus on international security. However, after spending a summer in a Spanish immersion program in Guatemala, my worldview had dramatically changed. In addition to language, I had begun to learn about extreme poverty and injustice, and most importantly I had also seen people living out their faith with a conviction and courage that I had never witnessed before. I had been inspired.

I still had a semester of school to finish, so I was looking for a place to volunteer where I could be around people with the same type of commitment and courage I had seen over the summer. That led me to Plant With Purpose, or Floresta, as it was then called. The tree planting emphasis seemed odd to me and the environmental language was a distraction. However, I did like the idea of helping poor families, and there were very few Christian volunteer options in San Diego at the time.

When I was finally hired (finally is not an exaggeration, but that is another story!) my father, by way of congratulations, said, “Planting trees for Jesus? Seriously? That has to be about the most marginal thing you can do with your life!”

I wasn’t sure he was wrong but this wasn’t supposed to be a long-term job, just a way station to something more important. Perhaps it would give me the experience I needed to land a job with World Vision, where I really wanted to work, or with any other more traditional agency, I reasoned.

It took me a few visits to the Dominican Republic and Haiti, but I slowly began to understand the intimate connection between deforestation, land degradation and rural poverty, and conversely the connection between reforestation, ecosystem restoration and prosperity.

With our predominantly suburban and urban lifestyles in the United States, we have become dangerously insulated from the land, and yet, just like those we serve, we are dependent on the land for our survival. For nearly two billion people in the world, smallholder and subsistence farmers, there is no insulation. The health of the land they occupy and from which they extract their living, is reflected in their own health. Their two most important assets are likely to be their topsoil and their water.

Most smallholder farmers aren’t working with the best land to begin with. The wealthy and powerful end up with the prime land: the fertile valleys and the flood plains, while the powerless and disadvantaged farm what is left – often steep hillsides. The precipitous and rocky slopes I have climbed through would not be recognized as farms at all, by most people. I have been told, only half-jokingly, that the most common injury for farmers comes in falling from their fields. There have been places that seems likely.

As I was to learn, without trees, soil erosion increases dramatically, and topsoil, this most precious of assets, quicky becomes the silt muddying the streams, and often causing destruction all the way down to the oceans and fisheries. (The downstream siltation of reservoirs had become such a problem in the Dominican Republic that several of our local leaders had originally gotten involved in reforestation while working for the government to extend the life of hydroelectric power plants.)

However, the soil was not the only important asset that farmers were losing. The hills of Hispaniola receive ample rain, but without vegetation, and especially trees to dissipate its energy and allow it to actually infiltrate the soil, that rain is often a liability – adding to erosion, agricultural runoff and flash flooding – rather than the asset farmers need. The tree canopy, roots and leaf litter would have acted as a sponge, allowing the rain to enter the aquifers, and provide the moisture needed by plants, animals and people. Many times, as I have stepped from a hot dusty field into a moist, cool forest, I have realized that the entire microclimate is different simply because of the presence of trees.

Few of these phenomena were lost on the local people. Someone once asked me if I traveled to Haiti and the Dominican Republic to “tell” farmers not to cut down their trees, as if they just needed a helpful city kid from San Diego to make that simple observation. Instead, I found that knowledge was rarely the issue. I have listened as Haitian farmers have explained the functioning of a watershed and the water cycle with an elegance that has rarely been matched by an American biology teacher. However, they have almost always finished with a rhetorical, “if I don’t cut trees (or make/sell charcoal) how am I supposed to feed my kids?”

The answer almost suggests itself. Looking at the scarred, barren hills of Haiti, and remembering that they once supported a dense forest, I began to imagine how different the lives of people would be if those hills were once again verdant, lush and productive. As I had learned elsewhere, it was not an impossible dream. God has given us an amazingly resilient and diverse creation.

Neither is it easy. It involves learning from and copying nature as well as bringing together local knowledge and the best of research from around the world. Most importantly it involves the active and enthusiastic participation of the people living there; people who already have almost no margin for error.

However, it can be done. We have seen the land become green, fertile and fruitful. We have had the blessing of watching as springs and creeks return to places they haven’t flowed in years. And I have seen how that transformation transforms the people who are a part of bringing it about.

After just a few years, I realized that I couldn’t go to another, more traditional humanitarian organization. I had become committed to this mission, which included fighting deforestation. For the poorest and hungriest people in the world, there is just no more effective way of fighting poverty. The majority will never benefit from job creation programs in the cities, which can’t possibly provide jobs for all of them. Furthermore, they already have jobs and skills. Every small farmer is already an entrepreneur and a small business owner.

Reading the Old Testament, I was thrilled to read about God’s process for restoring the land and helping those who depend on it, in Isaiah 41:17-20.

“The poor and needy search for water,
    but there is none;
    their tongues are parched with thirst.
But I the Lord will answer them;
    I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.
18 I will make rivers flow on barren heights,
    and springs within the valleys.
I will turn the desert into pools of water,
    and the parched ground into springs.
19 I will put in the desert
    the cedar and the acacia, the myrtle and the olive.
I will set junipers in the wasteland,
    the fir and the cypress together,
20 so that people may see and know,
    may consider and understand,
that the hand of the Lord has done this,
    that the Holy One of Israel has created it.

This seemed a confirmation to me. God, in this passage, is confronting the same problem that we were – poverty and a lack of water. Furthermore, God was choosing to respond by planting trees and restoring the watersheds that the people depended on. We were doing the same thing, and we too were doing it so that it might give glory to God and people might understand that the hand of the Lord had done it.

Sometime in those early years, I sat down with a potential funder, the director of a conservative foundation. He immediately started with, “I hope you aren’t going to tell me that God cares just as much about trees as he does about people.” In one of those rare times when I have had a quick answer, I replied, “No. What I will tell you is that the people need the trees!”

But, as I was to find out, while true, this is a narrow, anthropocentric and utilitarian approach. I still don’t claim to have deep knowledge of the relative priority that God places on trees and people, but I have learned that God calls us to something much deeper. But I will save that for Part 2…